


Death Comes for Bellamy Blake

by verbaepulchellae



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: After death reunion, Angst, Bellamy Blake dies peacefully in his sleep, Bellamy and Clarke will literally always find their way back to each other and that's canon kids, Character Death, F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Season 3 divergent and many, cue me writing the ending I needed for Bellamy and completely dismissing canon, many years later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26470864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbaepulchellae/pseuds/verbaepulchellae
Summary: Death comes for Bellamy Blake, like it has for so many of his friends before him. Even Clarke. It comes in what must be the most absurd way possible: when he’s asleep in his bed. Given how many things he’s lived through- falling to earth, wars, stable and unstable peace, to die from old age alone seems somewhat ridiculous. But that’s how it happens.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 32
Kudos: 205





	Death Comes for Bellamy Blake

**Author's Note:**

> I really needed to give myself something that I could keep as Bellamy and Clarke's end together. It is, like most things I want to write for the 100, season 3 divergent, and takes place after many many happy years of life together.

Death comes for Bellamy Blake, like it has for so many of his friends before him. Even Clarke. It comes in what must be the most absurd way possible: when he’s asleep in his bed. Given how many things he’s lived through- falling to earth, wars, stable and unstable peace, to die from old age alone seems somewhat ridiculous. But that’s how it happens.

He’s eighty-nine, and it’s been three years since Clarke passed, here in this same bed. They weren’t sure what took her, only that she grew more tired, and sometimes her memory seemed to waver a little, but she’d gone painlessly, still with her mind intact and her eyes bright. She’d died with a smile on her lips, curled into Bellamy as he held her in their bed, in their home that they’d built together from the ground up. 

He misses her like a limb, like a lung, like a sixth sense that he never knew he had until it was gone. He misses her, but he’s not lonely. They did everything they ever hoped they could and more. Between the two of them and their friends, they kept their people alive along enough to end land disputes and tensions between the former Arkadia, Trikru and Azgeda, among others. They dug in and planned out the lay of the land, created space for homes, for agriculture, for wells, for communal spaces and everything else they needed to have in order to do more than simply survive. And then they made good on their promises, and lived with more in mind than just making it to the next day.

Not that it was always easy. In the beginning, they were always busy and the only time they had for themselves was when they weren’t in meetings with other leaders of their village, or working with the others to till the fields and cure the meat and look after the growing number of kids among them. They spent their nights planning, at first, dreaming finally about a future they could see as a real, tangible thing for themselves, not just humanity. And then Bellamy and Clarke built their own home. They’d laid the corner stones together, raised the walls, hammered in the shingles and stone by stone, log by log, they shaped for themselves the life they wanted to share together.

At times they fought as bitterly as when they were younger, old hurts and betrayals still healing, but they loved hard too, harder than they fought and sweeter than they were ever cruel, and they always made it through. Like their home, they grew sturdier and more secure in each other with each passing year. 

There was a lot of laughter in their lives, and joy. They shared meals and work with their friends, figured out how to whittle and weave and grow herbs in broken bottles they hung in their windows. They started a family, two kids that had Clarke’s blue eyes and Bellamy’s dark hair and freckles, and three more that they brought into their family who didn’t have anyone else to care for them. There was even more laughter then, and tenderness. They told stories and played games they had learned as kids on the Ark as well as inventing entirely new ones. They figured out how to love without fear, and how to discipline with infinite kindness. 

The children they raised in this house had grown and started families of their own. And now some of those kids had grown too. Just two weeks ago, their first granddaughter had had her own daughter- the first child in their family to be christened again with Clarke’s name. Not the first in the village though. Bellamy knows several other young families that have given Clarke’s name to their daughters, and one who’ve given it to their son. 

He also knows a five year old ‘Raven’, and a little ‘Monty’ that always peaks out at him from behind his mothers’ legs. It’s strange, sometimes, to walk through their village and hear his friend’s names called out to chubby children, who toddled or fussed or shrieked with laughter in response. Strange, but not entirely surprising.

None of the technology that entertained adults and kids alike on the Ark made it to earth, and it’s vacuum, story telling grew as a way to pass an evening at a fire together, a way to pass winter months and mark celebrations as a village. The stories of their youth have been told countless times, and like all stories, have grown and changed, getting wilder in some parts, with new side adventures that make him laugh; losing finer details in others that make him grieve anew his friends who have already passed on. But the core of it all is still true, and the lessons learned still linger, even as he and his friends become legends: their names eponymous with wisdom, or skill, or strength or trickery- whatever it was that this younger generation wanted to imbue their children with from mythic stories they were raised on. 

To his own deep mortification, there’s even a baby Bellamy, just around a year old now. He was a wriggling, beautiful child, with thick hair and bright eyes and dark skin. His smile was infectious and when Bellamy had held him, he’d laughed as he reached for his name-sake’s face. 

“Strong kid,” he’d told baby Bellamy’s mother. She was the daughter of a survivor from the Ark’s crash landing and a Trikru tinker, and Bellamy knew her mostly from her skill with a bow and arrow on hunts. And to his name bearer, “Hope my name doesn’t give you my pigheadedness.”

“No,” little Bellamy’s mother had laughed as she took her son back. “No, he’s named for your bravery, and your kindness.” 

Clarke would have liked that.

His last day, although he doesn’t know it’s his last, he goes to Clarke’s grave, out in the woods, under tall, twin silver pines. He brings her a newly blossomed flower and sits for a long time, his back against the tree, fingers tracing where her name is carved into the bark. He tells her the little things he thinks she’d like: how one of their granddaughters had managed to spear the biggest boar on a recent hunt (“Right through the heart, you would have been pissed that she got that close,”); how Octavia’s son had just made up a new story about Clarke and her apparent legendary tracking skills (“I don’t know about that one, babe,”); how Bellamy had just planted a new batch of herbs in their kitchen and he hoped that the basil would come in quickly. Basil was always Clarke’s favorite.

He touches the ground next to her grave, where he’s asked to join her once it’s his time, and closes his eyes. “I’ll be with you soon,” he adds, as an afterthought. He misses her, too much for words, sometimes so much he’s not sure how he keeps breathing. The sun dapples down between the leaves and the wind wooshes around him and he can almost hear Clarke’s laughter and her arms falling comfortingly around his shoulders. _There is no rush,_ she seems to whisper through the wind. 

He walks along the perimeter fence, out of habit. He gruffs at a young guard about a patch that should have happened a week ago and then sits down with him and helps him figure out how to do it right then and there. He stops by his sister’s house to say hello and shares a cup of tea with her before he returns, slowly in the setting sun and the fresh summer air, to his and Clarke’s home. 

He’s in the habit of looking after the younger children in his family in the evenings, likes the burble and hubbub of the energy that can radiate out with no risk of danger or fear, and can fill up the rafters with joy almost like it might make the house break free and float away all on it’s own. He likes that he can give his kids and their kids a break, like he used to do for his friends, and like his friends used to do for him and Clarke.

He gets little Clarke for the first time that evening, along with some of his younger grandchildren who like hearing his stories. As he tells them about Wanheda and The Commander, Clarke the Second grabs his finger and hangs on, smiling even in her sleep. It’s with a sense of deep peace and gratitude that sends the kids back to their parents and hands Clarke off to his granddaughter when she comes to collect her. 

He doesn’t notice anything different, except for feeling a little more tired and a little slower at the end of the day. At the end of a long life, really.

So death comes from Bellamy Blake. He goes to bed and dreams about the early days, smiles on an inhale as Clarke, beautiful and young hoists their daughter into the air with a laugh, and his soul slips from his body on his exhale. It is quiet and gentle and he finds himself seemingly standing above his bed, looking down at his body, not quite believing that old man is him. Was him. 

He feels so light: none of the aches of old scars, nor the weight of his tired bones. His hands– funny to be dead, and have hands– look strong and capable and he stands without any need of the walking stick he’s adopted for the last five years. 

“Alright,” he finds himself chuckling, not at all afraid. “So what now?”

“You never did learn patience.”

And she’s there, next to him. 

“Clarke?” he chokes. He almost doesn’t dare believe it. It could be death, dressed like a friend. It could be his own desperate hope to see her again. 

But she reaches out and takes his hand, and she’s as solid as she ever felt in life. “Yeah,” she rasps, the way her voice always went when she was filled with emotion. “It’s me, Bellamy.”

She smiles at him, that toothy, soft smile that’s always made his chest ache, and the relief is so sharp it’s like a knife in his chest, cold and hot and permeating wonder through him. “Oh _god,”_ he whispers, feels like his throat- if he had a throat still- has gone tight with grief and joy all at once. “Oh god, I never thought I’d see you again.”

“I know,” she murmurs. “I know, Bellamy. Come here.” She folds into him as naturally as she did in life and she feels so solid and real in his arms as he holds her tight, tight as he can. She wraps her arms around his back and clutches him just as fiercely, tucking her face into his neck and he feels, like a memory, her shaky inhale. 

“You look so good, babe,” Bellamy says, pulling back to cup her face and take her in. “Death’s got nothing on you. Huh? Are you good? Are you ok?”

She laughs even as tears spill from her eyes and glistening on her cheeks. She could be twenty five and promising to spend her life with him, their hands bound together. She could be thirty and telling him they were going to have their first child, she could be sixty and kissing him awake in their bed, all mischief even after years and years together. He thumbs away the tears and chuckles too when she reaches up to do the same. 

“I’m good. How are you? How do you feel? Look at you, you look like you’re just a kid,” she murmurs, eyes searching his. 

“Weird,” Bellamy laughs a little. “I can’t remember the last time my back didn’t ache.” Clarke’s smile trembles even as she laughs. 

“I didn’t mean to leave you so soon. I wish I could have stayed longer.”

“You went when you needed to,” he whispers and kisses her, kisses her again because it’s been so long and that same deep contented feeling he always got when he was with her still seeps into him, infusing him with a peace he hadn’t realized he was missing these last few years. “I kept a part of you with me anyway,” he tells her, touching her gently at her temple and Clarke smiles up at him.

“I’m sorry that you won’t get to see this round of basil grow in.”

“Oh,” Bellamy chuckles. “So you were listening."

"I was, and I'll have you know-" Clarke starts with a laugh. "That I am a good tracker."

"Uh-huh. Sure babe," he smiles down into her face and strokes the soft tendrils of hair at her forehead. "As for the basil, don’t be- our family will enjoy it.”

Clarke grins up at him. “We did a damn fine job, Bellamy.”

“At everything,” he agrees. And then, sobering somewhat: “Do we get to keep this? I mean… do we have to say goodbye again?”

Clarke wraps her arms around his waist and leans in close, peering up at him as he tangles his fingers in her hair that she hasn’t worn this long since she was forty. “Nope. This we can keep, if we want, forever.”

“I like that. I like that a lot.” He ducks and kisses her again. “Together it is, then.”

“I missed you, you dork,” Clarke laughs. “You ready?”

“For you, babe? Always,” Bellamy says.

So death comes from Bellamy Blake, and he follows his wife readily.


End file.
